Failing to let girls finish their education could cost the world as much as $30 trillion in lost earnings and productivity annually, yet more than 130 million girls are out of school globally, the World Bank said on Wednesday.

Women who have completed secondary education are more likely to work and earn on average nearly twice as much as those with no schooling, according to a report by the World Bank.

About 132 million girls worldwide aged 6 to 17 do not attend school, while fewer than two-thirds of those in low-income nations finish primary school, and only a third finish lower secondary school, the World Bank said.

If every girl in the world finished 12 years of quality education, lifetime earnings for women could increase by $15 trillion to $30 trillion every year, according to the report.

Other positive impacts of completing secondary school education for girls include a reduction in child marriage, lower fertility rates in countries with high population growth, and reduced child mortality and malnutrition, the World Bank said.

“We cannot keep letting gender inequality get in the way of global progress,” Kristalina Georgieva, World Bank chief executive, said in a statement.

For a country that has given rise to a powerful philosophy of peaceful civil disobedience, India has had multiple female heads of state and is a backbone of the tech revolution, India still struggles with the basics.
I recognize the challenges are still immense. India was the worst G20 country in the world to be a woman, according to the Thomson Reuters Foundation in 2012. Last year’s Gender Gap report from the the World Economic Forumranked India 87th out of 144 countries in terms of the relative gaps between women and men in health, education, economy and politics. That put India below neighboring Bangladesh, as well as countries like Brazil and Thailand.
Still, 87th represents progress. A decade ago, India ranked 98th. The country has made strides in closing the gender gap in education enrollment, for example. Literacy among women has reached 63 percent (compared to 81 percent men. In 2006, only 50 percent of women were classified as literate.
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